Traffic planners often want to know the impact of events on city infrastructure, event managers often want to target their marketing to maximise the return on investment of their marketing budget, and individuals often want to know what events they would enjoy attending. Data that could be used to predict who will go to a certain place at a certain time is only available for a small sub-set of people, e.g. captured through surveys, customer details from tickets sales, or on web 2.0 location-based service applications where users can ‘check in’, or rate locations.
Mobile operators may collect network usage records (NUR) that contain information about call events, including telephone calls, SMS and mobile data retrieval. Usage of mobile phones and demographics has already been used to predict attendance at events, such as whether a mobile phone customer will churn (cancel their contract). Call detail records (e.g. ID, cell, and date and time) for mobile phone events have been used to infer home location and attendance at events; see, for instance, “The geography of taste: analyzing cell-hone mobility and social events”, F Calabrese et al, International Conference on Pervasive Computing, Helsinki, Finland, 2010, which deals with the analysis of crowd mobility during special events.
However, the sole use of home location as a parameter for determining attendance of an event results in poor accuracy of the prediction measurement. Home location is furthermore an inferior parameter for use in estimating the attendance of an event, as it only characterises the relative distance between the customer and the event. There is therefore a need to improve the accuracy and reliability with which the attendance of an event can be predicted, and in a broader sense the likelihood of cellular terminal carriers travelling to a predetermined location.
Additionally, large volumes of mobile phone subscribers located within a certain area and at a certain time of day often place heavy loads on the local telecommunications infrastructure. For instance, a lack of cellular base stations in the general vicinity of an event may limit the capability of the subscribers to initiate mobile events, such as placing calls or browsing the internet. Moreover, the power being delivered to cellular base stations in the vicinity of an event attended by many mobile phone subscribers may be insufficient to cater for all of the subscribers, and bandwidth may as a result be severely limited. There is therefore a need to more rapidly and more efficiently manage the load within a cellular network.
The invention described herein addresses these and other problems found in the prior art.